Hip means "enlightened" in Wolof

Clarence Major, in his study "Juba
to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang", traces the
origins of hip to the Wolof verb hepi ("to see") or
hipi ("to open one's eyes"), and dates its usage in
America to the 1700s. So from the linguistic start, hip
is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the
West African nations of Senegal and coastal Gambia. The slaves also
brought the Wolof dega ("to understand"), source of
the colloquial dig, and jev ("to disparage
or talk falsely"), the root of jive. Hip begins, then, as
a subversive intelligence that outsiders developed under the eye of
insiders. It was one of the tools Africans developed to negotiate
an alien landscape, and one of the legacies they contributed to
it. The feedback loop of white imitation, co-optation and homage
began immediately.

(I edited the above paragraph a bit; either I'm not hip to Leland's frequent use of like or somebody at MSNBC did a bad global replace.) That makes me want to track down both Leland's and Major's books, although the latter may have to wait -- Amazon lists used copies starting at $55! Time for a reprinting. (Via Negrophile.)

On a completely different subject, Language Hat
quotes
at length from a piece by Keki Daruwala on
language in Indian poetry. I'm surprised that Daruwala scoffs at code-switching in poetry; it's extremely common in Chicano and other US latino poetry. But maybe (a wild guess here) the conventions of poetry in other Indian languages diverge enough from those of English that the result would be a clash of genres as well as languages. Which makes me think that's just the kind of challenge some writers would choose to confront head-on.